75 films that could only have been made in Britain

Telegraph Film

20 May 2015 • 10:23am

Early Hitchcock, vintage Bond, horrifying Ben Wheatley... Are these the greatest British films ever made? We think so

Hollywood brings glitz, glamour and big budgets to movie-making;
France has avant-garde artistry. But what about Britain?

Looking at our selection of the 75 greatest British movies of the
past century, you'll find that Britain excels at genres you'd expect
(kitchen sink and period drama, class-obsessed satire) and plenty you
wouldn't (strange sci-fi, blood-freezing contemporary horror). Here
are the essential home-grown films to watch, listed in the order they
were made:

1. The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933)

Credit:
ITV / Rex Features

The film that made Korda the leading producer-director of his era
and Charles Laughton into an Oscar-winning international star, this is
how period biopics should be done: with comic vim, unbridled
theatricality and a cavalier jauntiness, thumbing its nose at history.
Catherine of Aragon is omitted entirely for being too dull; step
forward Merle Oberon as Anne Boleyn and Elsa Lanchester as a
hysterically gawky Anne of Cleves. It still has satirical
entertainment value that’s not far off Blackadder-esque.

2. The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

There have been four major film versions of Scottish author John
Buchan's 1915 thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps but the best of the
quartet is Alfred Hitchcock's marvellously inventive 1935 film. The
story – about an innocent man accused of murder being pursued by both
the police and a deadly spy ring – appealed to Hitchcock's love of
paranoia and the man on the run.

3. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)

Hitchcock took a great Edwardian novel, about an inept terrorist and
his credulous wife, and boiled it down to 76 breakneck minutes. The
result is a zinging enigma of a movie, punctuated with disquieting
images and haunting snatches of speech.

4. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

Credit:
ITV / Rex Features

The film that catapulted Hitchcock to Hollywood was the
second-to-last, and perhaps also the very best, that he made in
Britain. In this lightning-witted comic thriller, Margaret Lockwood
and Michael Henderson’s travellers-in-arms comb their train for a
disappeared fellow passenger everyone else insists they never saw – a
riveting core mystery from which Hitchcock allows all kinds of secrets
and deceptions to spider-web out.

5. Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940)

When MGM remade this four years later in their George Cukor/Ingrid
Bergman version, Louis B Mayer tried to buy up and burn all prints of
the British film, lest it court invidious comparisons. Thankfully, he failed.

The underrated Dickinson, much-championed by Martin Scorsese, did a
far more tense, terse and economical job with the Patrick Hamilton
play about a devious husband trying to drive his wife insane. As an
elegant suspense picture, it holds its own with prime Hitchcock: Diana
Wynyard’s fine-tuned distress and Anton Walbrook’s unforgettable
portrait of cunning marital sadism make it a keeper.

6. That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941)

Alexander Korda's high–gloss 1941 weepie about the relationship
between Horatio, Lord Nelson, and Emma, Lady Hamilton was supposedly
Winston Churchill's favourite film. As a bonus, it boasts the tragic
romance between Vivien Leigh and her husband Laurence Olivier in their
final screen pairing.

Beyond that, Leigh gives her most under–regarded performance in That
Hamilton Woman by playing the tragic victim wonderfully at the film’s
climax: listening to Hardy's account of Trafalgar stricken with horror
at the news he is so clearly holding back. Rainy Sunday afternoons
should have all this within easy reach.

7. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric
Pressburger, 1943)

Forty years of love and war take their toll on a man and his nation
in Powell and Pressburger’s masterful comic drama about a Boer War
hero (Roger Livesey) whose elegant ideals become increasingly at odds
with the world he’s fighting to defend. Pilloried on release at the
height of the Second World War, it’s fitting that perhaps the greatest
film ever made about the ebb and flow of history has been so
thoroughly vindicated by it.

8. Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)

Credit:
Park Circus/NOEL COWARD/ANTHONY HAVELOCK-ALLAN/RONALD NEAME

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep at the end of Brief
Encounter, Lean's tale of the oh-so-terribly British – and painfully
unconsummated – love affair between repressed middle-class housewife
Laura (Celia Johnson) and Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a stranger
she meets by chance at a train station. The script, based on Noel
Coward's a one-act play Still Life, is infused with a poignant,
pointed delicacy, evoking the way in which people not used to giving
in to feelings can suddenly find themselves overcome. But the film
really belongs to Johnson: it's her beautifully expressive (and these
days almost comically refined) voice, and huge, eloquent eyes that
really hammer home the gut-wrenching emotion.

The wind-stung beauty of the Scottish islands provides a suitably
mythic backdrop for this wise and wonderful romantic comedy from
Powell and Pressburger: the missing link between the directors’ more
realistic wartime films and the lush, lyrical marvels that would
follow. Wendy Hiller plays the social-climbing city girl who becomes
stranded on the Isle of Mull shortly before her marriage to a wealthy
industrialist, where she discovers, with the help of Roger Livesey’s
affable young laird, that not all riches are material.

10. Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)

Right from the desolate establishing shots of the Kentish marshes -
Guy Green's glorious cinematography won one of two Oscars - David
Lean's approach here is all contrasts: innocence versus experience,
light against dark. The screenplay is a marvel of narrative economy,
with just the right amount of enriching voiceover from John Mills's
adult Pip, but not so much that the importance of telling the story
visually is ever neglected.

11. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece: David Niven is the Walter
Raleigh-quoting Second World War bomber pilot facing certain death
with a stiff upper lip (“So long Bob, I’ll see you in a minute”), who
falls in love in his final moments with American radio operator June
(Kim Hunter), cheats death temporarily and faces a trial in the
afterlife as to whether he be allowed to remain on Earth. Jack
Cardiff’s luminous cinematography and startling special effects, such
as the moving escalator to the “other world”, make this romance as odd
and enchanted a piece of film-making as you are likely to see.

12. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

Fifty Shades of Grey can only dream of being as erotic a work as
Powell and Pressburger’s tale of repressed desire and simmering
passions among a community of nuns at a convent in the Himalayas. Jack
Cardiff’s cinematography, with its rich, dark interiors and mountains
painted on glass, is among the most beautiful in film.

13. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

Martin Scorsese oversaw the 2-year restoration process for the
ecstatically received new print of one of British cinema’s great
wonders, Powell and Pressburger’s hallucinatory masterpiece about
dancing, death, and everything in between.

14. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

Credit:
REX/Courtesy Everett Collection

Kind Hearts and Coronets is a black comedy filmed in bright
sunshine, a cool piece of heartlessness played for laughs, with a
subplot preoccupied by love. Its elegant surface – even homicide does
not challenge Louis's sartorial éclat – masks uglier motives and
truths: the film dares us to disapprove. It is a work of immense
sophistication that combines the startlingly modern and the obviously
old-fashioned. For director Robert Hamer, it would be the one film of
the handful he made that would guarantee him immortality.

15. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Perhaps the greatest thriller to come out of postwar British cinema,
Carol Reed’s adaptation of the Graham Greene novel (the second after
1948’s The Fallen Idol) shimmers with intrigue and suspense
throughout. Shot on luminous black and white 35mm film, Robert
Krasker's evocative camerawork highlights the back alleys of Vienna as
well as a brilliant performance by Orson Welles as opportunist Harry Lime.

16. The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson, 1955)

This classic tale of British wartime valour was the most successful
film at the British box office in 1955. Michael Redgrave stars as the
real-life aviation designer Barnes Willis who invented the bouncing
bomb that was used to breach enemy dams during night-time raids. Much
though we all know how it ends, the scenes where were see the bomb in
action are genuinely gripping. Richard Todd also gives a charismatic
performance as wing commander Guy Gibson.

17. The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955)

Credit:
Hand Out

American scriptwriter William Rose claimed to have dreamt the entire
screenplay of this Ealing black comedy, and the plot of this hilarious
London caper is certainly surreal. Katie Johnson stars as the
bewildered Mrs Wilberforce, who escapes her lopsided house to tell the
police of fantastical crimes. Of course, when a gang of mobsters -
disguised as members of a string quartet - take up residency with her
talking parrot, the bobbies don't believe her.

18. The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

Credit:
Everett Collection / Rex Features

Alec Guinness was sensational as Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson,
winning the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe Best Actor awards for his
1957 performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai. The film was
directed by David Lean but it was an unhappy experience for Guinness.
The pair did not speak to each other at all for a 48-hour period
during filming in Sri Lanka and Guinness later wrote that Lean
"surrounds himself with sycophants" and "has no sense
of humour".

19. Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

Credit:
Everett Collection/ Rex Features

MR James is the greatest ever practitioner of the English ghost
story: ironic, then, that it took a French director and American money
to capture his spirit this well on screen, with some of the best uses
of London locations since early Hitchcock. The Ring and latterly It
Follows have borrowed a cue from this pass-on-the-curse plot: Dana
Andrews is the sceptical psychologist locking horns with an urbane
devil-worshipper (fabulous Niall MacGinnis) while a gnarled medieval
demon breathes down their necks.

Wholly available to
watch here.

20. Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)

There have been countless imitations but none can lay a
blood-stained glove on Terence Fisher's adaptation of Bram Stoker's
chilling novel. Christopher Lee plays the blood-thirsty Count, all
curdling terror and knowing humour, while Peter Cushing provides solid
support as Abraham Van Helsing. A cape-tivating classic.

21. Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)

Critics scorned Peeping Tom when it was released, largely due to the
habits of its lead character: Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), an amateur
filmmaker with a compulsion to murder women and get kick from filming
the horrified expressions on their faces as they come to realise their fate.

But contemporary critics may have overlooked in 1960 was that
voyeurism was its central theme. But who is the voyeur? Before his
death in 1990, Powell saw the reputation of Peeping Tom rise and rise.
It is now regarded as a key film in British cinema history and one of
the greatest horror movies of all time.

An adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents
remains one of the most spine-chillingly eerie horror films ever made,
as well as one of the earliest to tap into the "creepy"
qualities of young children. Deborah Kerr is excellent as isolated
nursery governess Miss Giddens, who begins to suspect that her dead
predecessor isn't quite as dead as she seems, and that all is not as
it should be with her young charges ... Sexual repression, obsession
and slowly-creeping madness have rarely been so well portrayed.

23. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

There have been many attempts to portray the extraordinary and
enigmatic figure that is TE Lawrence – a flamboyant young English army
officer that inspired and led an Arabian army against the Turks –
though none have been as successful David Lean’s 1962 classic. A
debutant as Lawrence, Peter O’Toole channels a truly complex character
that is ruthless, charismatic and, at times, self-hating.

24. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)

Based on Alan Sillitoe’s short story of the same name, director Tony
Richardson's film follows a young boy who is sent to a borstal after
being involved in a bakery robbery and finds solace in his talent for
long distance running. Tom Courtney is superb as the defiant Borstal
boy Colin Smith and while the film is valuable as social history, it
retains its vitality.

25. This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963)

Lindsay Anderson’s feature debut is one of the strongest films to
emerge from the kitchen-sink movement that swept across British
filmmaking in the Sixties. Richard Harris stars as Frank Machin, an
up-and-coming rugby league star, who enters into a fraught, agonised
affair with his widowed landlady Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts).
Roberts delivers the best performance of her short career, while the
scrum scenes remain among the best depictions of sport ever captured
on celluloid.

26. From Russia with Love (Terence Young, 1963)

Credit:
REX/SNAP

Director Terence Young's 1963 caper was Bond's second screen outing
and it remains, in many ways, the best. Generally favouring the
claustrophobia of the westbound Orient Express over grandstanding
set-pieces, it has a first-rate villain (Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb),
henchman (Robert Shaw's Donald "Red" Grant) and girl
(Daniela Bianchi as Tatiana Romanova), not to mention the mighty
Connery in his pantherine prime. The plot is deliciously preposterous
and that long section on the train positively crackles with tension,
finally exploding in a fight-sequence that is still unmatched in the
entire 007 canon.

27. Zulu (Cy Enfield, 1964)

The Battle of Rorke's Drift, in which 150 British soldiers
eventually defeated 4,000 Zulu warriors, is brought to dramatic life
in Cy Enfield's military masterpiece. Michael Caine is pitch-perfect
as the pompous Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead but it is Stanley Baker as
the heroic Lieutenant John Chard who really captures the sense of
panic that rattled through the British camp that sweltering day in 1879.

28. A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964)

More than 50 years on, A Hard Day’s Night still feels as fresh and
cheeky as when it was first released. It’s the first and best of the
five Beatles films, and follows the band on a brief trip from
Liverpool to London, where they play at a televised concert. The
opening sequence recalls French New Wave cinema proving, once again,
the Beatles’ ability to see a trend approaching, and slip in ahead of
it smiling. Its visions of Britain and stardom are as peculiar and
vivid as they were half-a-century ago, and it all remains roaringly funny.

29. The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie, 1965)

Credit:
Cine Text / Allstar

Michael Caine stars as Army sergeant Harry Palmer in this gritty
espionage film that pitted itself as the antidote to the fantasy gleam
of the Bond franchise. Palmer finds himself in the middle of a
brainwashing plot laden with red tape, and must fight against time to
save himself and his colleagues.

30. Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967)

Halfway between The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1970), Losey,
that American ex-pat and clever dissector of the English class system,
also teamed up with Harold Pinter on this prickly drama of
extra-marital peccadilloes among Oxford dons, played by Dirk Bogarde
and a superbly insinuating Stanley Baker. With its boldly experimental
approach to form, it’s a splintered enigma of a movie about the skull
beneath the skin of genteel provincial life. On each viewing it
reveals new facets, like a puzzle-box gradually unlocked by giving it
a different quarter-turn.

31. Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967)

John Schlesinger’s spellbinding adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel
rings with the rhythms of rural life. The story it tells isn’t just of
Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) and her trio of imperfect suitors,
but also of the frontier society that sustains all four: its songs and
traditions, and bedrock-deep relationship with the landscape.

The Dorset scenery seems to glow from within (the cinematographer is
a pre-Walkabout Nicolas Roeg), as do the fashionable cast – not least
of all Terence Stamp’s snugly trousered Frank Troy, who’s a scoundrel
for the ages.

Lindsay Anderson’s anarchic vision of English public school life
etches itself into the memory of even those who didn’t grow up
familiar with it. In part that’s thanks to David Sherwin’s shocking,
revelatory script, and in part due to Malcolm McDowell – before the
stardom of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange – whose disgruntled anti-hero
Mick Travis prowls around the stately premises with menace and
fulfills the dark fantasies of many a schoolboy.

33. Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)

Not just a nonpareil revenge-horror film but something close to a
British western: there’s much spirited riding around the Suffolk
countryside and a moral battle to be won at great cost. Resurrecting
the fabled cruelty of 17th century witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins (an
insatiable Vincent Price), then-24-year-old director Reeves, a year
before his death from an overdose, whipped this up into a thunderous
allegory about violence and its capacity to beget more. The insane
blood-lust of the finale won’t be forgotten in a hurry. (Read Matthew Sweet on the short life of Michael
Reeves here.)

34. Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)

Credit:
Ronald Grant Archive

To call Kes timeless is not quite right. For it’s a film that’s
steeped in a very particular time and place. It was made in 1969 by a
director credited as “Kenneth Loach”; when teenagers like its
dirty-nailed hero Billy Casper (David Bradley) still read the Dandy
and the most miserable fate that could befall a young adult would be
to labour down the mine.

Now, it still cries its authentic song of rage. As Billy, David
Bradley is eloquent when describing his kestrel and touching in his
ability still to feel hurt. He is as romantic as Truffaut’s Antoine
Doinel, and as enduring and vital a Northern outsider as Mark E Smith,
Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker.

35. Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

Mick Jagger makes his acting debut in this twisted dark crime film
from Cammell and Roeg, but don't expect tales of rock 'n' roll.
Instead, Jagger's character Turner, a reclusive musician, becomes
captor to Chas, a sadistic thug on the run from more evil villains.
Drugs, sex and violence warranted mixed reviews when Performance was
first released, but Cammell's death in 1996 collided with a critical
reappraisal. The fact that Performance has influenced everyone from
Tarantino to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has helped
cement its position in British cinema.

36. Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971)

As vengeful gangster Jack Carter, Michael Caine returns to a
rabbit-warren Newcastle that has ceased to exist in recent years of
regeneration. There are no good guys in this quietly gripping
adaptation of Ted Lewis' 1969 novel Jack's Return Home, but
cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky brings out the stark beauty of the
North East while capturing their attempts to kill each other.

37. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Stanley Kubrick's dystopian crime drama, based on the novella by
Anthony Burgess, is a disturbing study of juvenile delinquency.
Malcolm McDowell gives a tour de force performance as the sociopathic
gang leader whose violent tendencies land him in a creepy psychiatric
experiment. The film was passed uncut by the British censors and was
nominated for several Baftas and Academy Awards but after it was
linked to a series of copycat crimes, Kubrick himself withdrew it from
distribution. It was only after Kubrick's death in 1999 that the film
was made available in the UK.

38. The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971)

Credit:
1971 Rex Features/Collection/REX Shutterstock

Russell was already the enfant terrible of British cinema, thanks to
his mad music biopics and sexually frank Women in Love (1969). Then he
dropped this whopping payload of orgiastic anarchy right in front of
the establishment’s nose. Warner Brothers refused to release it uncut:
out went the scene where deranged nuns sexually assault a statue of
Christ, and most of the one where Vanessa Redgrave masturbates with
the charred femur bone of Oliver Reed. It’s like nothing else, now
restored and rightly hailed as the Russellest film of them all.

39. Bill Douglas Trilogy (Bill Douglas, 1972-8)

Credit:
BFI

Scottish cinema’s Oresteia: a pinnacle, in three parts. From the raw
material – as in flayed-raw – of a grindingly impoverished upbringing
in 1940s Newcraighall, south-east of Edinburgh, Douglas wrought tender
poetry in black-and-white, starting with My Childhood (1972) and
continuing through My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978). The
fortunes of Jamie (Stephen Archibald) from ages 10 through 16 make
this Boyhood with borstals: there’s grit under its nails, and a vision
of neglect that won’t fade, but also sublimity in the tiny
satisfactions a day can bring.

40. Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

What begins as a meditation on grief winds up one of the most
chilling, devastating ghost stories in British cinematic history.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, then a real-life couple, star as
the parents of a dead child who take a healing trip to wintry Venice,
only to experience strange premonitions and constant reminders of
their tragedy. The denouement, in particular that red plastic mac, is
terrifying. Such a shame the film's being remade.

41. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

Credit:
Allstar/Cinetext/WARNER BROS

Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackeray's 1844 novel The Luck of Barry
Lyndon, a satirical picaresque about the fortune and status-hungry
Irish rogue, pushed the director’s technical ambition to new limits.
Determined to shoot as few scenes as possible without electrical
light, Barry Lyndon is consciously a museum piece. Subjected to the
director's infamous regime of many, many arduous takes, the actors’
faces light up the film and the era, like a series of fine, carefully
hung, oil portraits. Kubrick's cast may have been required to sit for
these for days and weeks on end, but no one could say the results
weren't worth it.

42. Pressure (Horace Ové, 1976)

As the first member of his family to be born in Britain, teenager
Tony (Herbert Norville) finds two very different worlds jostling him
on either side: his Trinidadian heritage on one, the beckoning dream
of English middle-classdom on the other. Horace Ové’s debut feature
remains as vibrant, honest and humane an exploration of the black
British experience now as it was in the mid-1970s. It’s the last great
(and perhaps also most under-appreciated) film of the British New Wave.

43. Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)

Credit:
Everett Collection / Rex Feature

This hysterical comedy about an accidental Messiah caused no
end of controversy when it was released in 1979. It was Monty Python’s
second film, released four years after The Holy Grail, and told the
story of a Jewish man who happened to be born on the same day as Jesus
and is later mistaken for the prophet. The film’s biting yet upbeat
tone and religious satire drew accusations of blasphemy and was even
banned in a handful of countries.

44. Radio On (Christopher Petit, 1979)

A road trip and a mindset, a time and a place – the late 1970s, with
Thatcher just in – and a hypnotic shoestring exercise that thrives on
having virtually no plot at all. A DJ played by David Beames drives
from London to Bristol, after his brother is found dead in a bath.
Borrowing a camera assistant from Wim Wenders, Petit makes of this a
resonant statement about certainties gone astray, and with Kraftwerk,
Eno, and Bowie’s German version of “Heroes” on the soundtrack, it
feels like an aural memory-map for its moment.

45. The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980)

Anyone weary of the British geezer gangster films of the Nineties
and 2000s should go back a decade to this masterly exercise in guv'nor
filmmaking, which is as much a vehicle for Helen Mirren as for Bob
Hoskins. There's a sleek parallel between Michelle Pfeiffer's moll in
Scarface and Mirren, wife to Hoskin's gangster Harold. But where
Pfeiffer came covered in cocaine and trauma, Victoria's elegant self
is more than a match for Harold, an East End gangster making a very
botched attempt at going legitimate. Watch out for Pierce Brosnan and
Daragh O'Malley (Bond and Sharpe's Sergeant Harper) in early roles IRA
hitmen, as well as the almost obligatory Dexter Fletcher child cameo.

46. Gregory's Girl (Bill Forsyth, 1981)

Credit:
The Kobal Collection

Was there ever a more charming film than Gregory's Girl? It may not
contain many jokes, and there are only one or two laugh-out-loud
moments, but almost every scene puts a smile on your face. From the
opening, in which a sex-starved schoolboy faints off-camera at the
sight of a nurse removing her bra, to the closing sequence, in which
Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) and his new girlfriend dance in the
park while lying down, the film is filled with quirkiness and, well,
charm. Gregory's Girl put Scottish director Bill Forsyth on the map.
He went on to make bigger films, but he never found a more engaging
blend of offbeat comedy, warmth and insight into the peculiarities of
the teenage mind.

Hugh Hudson’s Oscar-winning biopic is as sincere and courageous as
the two men at its heart: Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), the Olympic
runner spurred on by his Christian faith, and Harold Abrahams (Ben
Cross), his Jewish teammate marginalised by his. Whatever the film’s
nostalgic 1920s setting suggests soundtrack-wise, it’s probably not
plangent electronica from Greek keyboard whizz Vangelis, but that
inspired mismatch of sound and vision only reinforces the sense that
the story we’re witnessing is timeless.

48.The Draughtsman's Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982)

Spectacularly original, The Draughtsman’s Conrtact seemed to herald
a thrilling new filmmaking talent from Peter Greenaway. An artist
(Anthony Higgins) is commissioned to draw a 17th century estate from
12 different angles at different times of the day for a modest stipend
and 12 sexual favours from Mrs Herbert (Janet
Suzman), the lady of the manor. But Greenaway applies a surreal
sensibility to a thoroughly conventional genre format, the
country-house murder mystery. The audience remain in the dark about
the mystery in this minor masterpiece by a consummate English eccentric.

49. Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)

Credit:
c.Cineplex/Everett / Rex Feature

Withnail and I are louche unemployed actors who live in squalor and
drink themselves silly. Grant's delivery of mordant mutterings is
superb. The lines, from Bruce Robinson's semi-autobiographical script,
are an oddball joy and mostly involve drink and the inevitable
hangover. An escape from urban squalor in Camden lands them in rural
squalor in Cumbria. To add to the chaos, there is a scary bull, a
malevolent poacher and a flirtatious Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths),
who unexpectedly turns up with amorous designs on a decidedly
unwilling I.

Once regarded for many years as a cult film, Withnail and I now
stands as one of the finest British films of the Eighties. And what's
not to like about a film with the line: "Don't threaten me with a
dead fish"?

50. Howards End (James Ivory, 1992)

One of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory finest collaborations, this
adaptation of EM Forster's novel about a class-obsessed family earned
nine Oscar nominations. Emma Thompson, who won one for her portrayal
of 'poor relation' Margaret Wilcox, carries this sumptuous film.

51. Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992)

Credit:
Copyright (c) 1992 Rex Features/Everett/REX Shutterstock

Sally Potter’s ambitious adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928
darting, gender-bending journey through English history, based on the
family history of her close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West,
brought the story’s events right up to the film’s present day of 1992.
Tilda Swinton stars as the eponymous nobleman in the Elizabethan
court. The aging Queen, played by Quentin Crisp, promises Orlando a
castle and land provided he “[does] not grow old.” At her command,
Orlando lives on for centuries, but encounters trouble keeping the
entitlement to his land when he wakes up one day as a woman.

52. The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993)

Emma Thompson was reunited with Merchant Ivory for this meticulous
imagining of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel of the same name. Thompson won
another Oscar nomination for her performance as sensitive housekeeper
Miss Kenton, who attempts to find the human side of obsessively
devoted butler Mr Stevens (Anthony Hopkins, also Academy Award
nominated for the role). Combining impeccable acting with upstairs,
downstairs and an inter-war period, it's a near-perfect British film.

53. Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994)

Written and directed by Richard Curtis at the peak of his powers,
this story of a group of friends and their endless trails round
dreadful Home Counties weddings is an absolute joy. Sharper, wittier
and sweeter than you remember – this also applies to leading man Hugh
Grant – it strikes the perfect balance between hilarity and
heartbreak. As much as paean to friendship as it is to the
eccentrities of British poshness, Four Weddings is one of the all-time
great comedies. A sole mis-step in casting Andie McDowell as Grant's
phenomenally wet love interest can be forgiven.

54. Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995)

Credit:
(C) BSKYB

There's lots that makes Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility one of the
best Austen adaptations around, from a glittering Best-of-British cast
(including Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman), to a script that retains some
of the acidity of the original novel. But the most compelling reason
to watch of all is Emma Thompson. Alongside Kate Winslet's impulsive
Marianne, Thompson is an absolute delight as level-headed heroine
Elinor, the "sensible" sister. Watching her overcome by
emotion at the end of the film, when she realises that she hasn't lost
her longterm love-interest for good, is pure cinematic cartharsis.

55. Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. In fact, do what the
hell you want but for God's sake find the time to watch Danny Boyle's
hilarious, heart-breaking tale of sex, drugs (a few more drugs) and
rock 'n' roll. Adapted from Irvine Welsh's novel, the film follows
five party-loving wastrels trying to make sense of their dead-end
existence in mid-Nineties Edinburgh. Boasting the finest soundtrack in
20 years and a cast that includes Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle,
Trainspotting is a life-affirming wonder.

56. Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996)

Credit:
Channel 4 Television

Cannes was impressed with Brenda Blethyn’s performance in Secrets
& Lies, in which she plays Cynthia, a weary, troubled,
over-emotional single mother whose burden is increased considerably
when the 30-ish Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) turns up out of the
blue with the news that she is Cynthia’s daughter. Surely some
mistake, thinks Cynthia, especially since she is white and Hortense is
black. But, no, there has been no mistake. Serious issues are
addressed, but – and this is typical of Leigh’s films – that doesn’t
mean it isn’t funny and heart-warming, too.

57. The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997)

This gritty comedy based in post-industrial Sheffield experienced as
much of a rags-to-riches journey as its characters: made with a tiny
budget of £3 million, the story of former steel workers stripping for
a better life captured the nation's imagination - bringing with it box
office earnings of £170 million. Simon Beaufoy's script brought issues
of suicide and homosexuality side-by-side with quintessentially
British tokens: garden gnomes and building society books.

58. Gallivant (Andrew Kötting, 1997)

A family drive around the English, Welsh and Scottish coastlines
becomes a campervan trip to the outermost fringes of Britishness in
Andrew Kötting's surreal and soul-nourishing documentary. The director
goes on the road with his 87-year-old grandmother Gladys and his
seven-year-old daughter Eden, born with a rare and potentially
life-shortening genetic disorder, for possibly the last shared journey
the three will make. But though mortality looms on the horizon, the
film throbs with life and fun, delighting in the songs, traditions and
folklore the trio encounter on their meandering quest.

59. The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley, 1997)

Credit:
Film Stills

Henry James is notoriously difficult to adapt well, but this is the
darkly shimmering exception, thanks to Hossein Amini’s shrewd
wrangling of ambiguity in the script. Helena Bonham Carter still
hasn’t topped Kate Croy, conniving but also trapped by her
circumstances, as a leading role; the masquerade of her and Linus
Roache's motives makes the film a psychological thriller of sorts.
Softley directs the Venice sequences with bewitching gamesmanship,
then tears your heart out at the end.

60. Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)

The film no-one thought Mike Leigh could pull off has become one of
the director’s defining achievements – an elegant, eccentric period
drama about the making of The Mikado without a kitchen sink in sight.
Jim Broadbent gives a career-best performance as the librettist W.S.
Gilbert, whose creative partnership with Arthur Sullivan (Allan
Corduner) has run aground – but, inspired by an exhibition of Japanese
art and culture, he sets about writing what would prove to be his
masterpiece. With an enormous, uniformly wonderful ensemble cast, who
perform Leigh’s dialogue like music.

61. A Room for Romeo Brass (Shane Meadows, 1999)

Credit:
Alliance Atlantis

Director Shane Meadows proved his mettle with his second film, a
seemingly lackadaisical tale of two 12-year-old Nottinghamshire lads
(Andrew Shim and Ben Marshall) whose friendship is upended when
unemployed sad sack Morell starts hanging out with them. Meadows
coerces funny and touching performances from the two youngsters (Shim,
incidentally, would go on to play the friendly Milky in Meadow’s This
is England series), but it is Paddy Considine, in his first
professional acting role, who shapes a thoroughly believable creation
in the nasal Morell, balancing a goofy likeability with an ominous
instability, and turns the whole story on a scary dime halfway through.

62. Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999)

Lynne Ramsay's 1999 debut feature won its director the Carl Foreman
Award for Newcomer in British Film at the BAFTA Awards. The film
follows a 12-year-old boy, Jamie, growing up in Glasgow in 1973.

63. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000)

Terence Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel charts the
unjust downfall of New York City socialite Lily Bart, played by a
never-better Gillian Anderson, at devastating close quarters. Davies’
film doesn’t linger on period set-dressing: the interiors it’s more
fascinated by are those of its characters, with sustained close-ups
revealing what’s concealed within their souls. Very different in
habitat from Davies’ early, Liverpool-set work, it nonetheless shares
those films’ elegance and patience, and sharp awareness of the power
of social status.

64. Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)

Years before Downton Abbey took the world by storm, Julian Fellowes
brought country estates, service and Maggie Smith to the screen in
this successful period drama. Kristen Scott Thomas, Charles Dance,
Stephen Fry, Richard E Grant, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren and David
Jacobi join Smith in an enormous ensemble cast, who are brought
together in a murder mystery after an American filmmaker (Bob Balaban)
arrives at Gosford to observe British aristocracy.

65. Black Sun (Gary Tarn, 2005)

Credit:
ICA

The French writer and artist Hugues de Montalembert was blinded in
1978, at age 35, when a drug addict in New York threw paint-stripper
in his face. “It was like falling into a pot of dark honey”, he says
of slipping into sightlessness. Gary Tarn’s remarkable documentary has
him recount all the adjustments he had to undergo, and his new
experience of the world as a blind person. Meanwhile, every image in
his film’s experimental tapestry of visuals makes us meditate on what
it means to see.

(Wholly available to watch here.)

66. Deep Water (Louise Osmond, Jerry Rothwell, 2006)

Narrated by Tilda Swinton, Deep Water is a gravely compassionate and
piercingly sad account of Donald Crowhurst's fate in the 1968
round–the–world yacht race. Crowhurst was a weekend sailor and amateur
inventor, whose curious, reticent personality the British media took
to their hearts. It quickly became clear that he hadn't a snowball's
chance in hell of winning, and his best hope of coming out of the race
with his pride intact was merely completing the circumnavigation as planned.

But at a certain point – was it in the Sargasso, or the Bermuda
Triangle? – he couldn't face turning back. Before vanishing at sea, he
scrawled more than 25,000 words in his logbook, and the window these
records open on his unravelling mind is devastating.

67. Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007)

Unrelated is an emotionally and sometimes wince-inducingly acute
debut that looks and feels and sounds like few other British films.
That's partly to do with its setting (Tuscany); its social milieu (the
characters are all solidly, unashamedly middle-class); and its story
(a subtle and largely internal journey on the part of a middle-aged
married woman who has been invited by her oldest friend Verena to stay
at an Italian holiday villa.

68. Sleep Furiously (Gideon Koppel, 2008)

Gideon Koppel’s documentary about vanishing ways of life in the
remote Welsh farming community of Trefeurig is a patchwork quilt of
beautiful images, snug and lovingly stitched. Two lines of sheep file
across a rain-darkened field; a plump, yellow mobile library winds
down valley roads; a town cryer pads along a lane, ringing his bell at
no-one in particular. The title comes from a grammatically correct but
meaningless sentence formulated by Noam Chomsky, and suggests a deep,
underlying order to the everyday activities Koppel’s camera observes.

69. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

The 1981 Maze Prison hunger strikes, in which provisional IRA member
Bobby Sands famously died, gave McQueen his first subject for a
feature – as scalding, uncompromising and intellectually rigorous a
debut as any British filmmaker has managed in decades. Michael
Fassbender devotes himself body and soul to the role, but it’s the
long-take rigour of McQueen’s directorial approach, reprised
harrowingly in 12 Years a Slave, that makes you feel the slow-drip
agony of solitary confinement and self-inflicted annihilation.

70. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Credit:
Holly Horner

Andrea Arnold works wonders almost everywhere in this film: the
drip-drop drabness of kitchen-sink drama is stilled, alive, and newly
dangerous. Set in an Essex housing estate, 15-year-old Mia (Katie
Jarvis) tussles with her single mother (Kierston Wareing), who wants
to pack her off into juvenile care. Entering the fray is Michael
Fassbender, who delivers a spellbinding turn, and the film shifts
gears unmistakably whenever it’s around him.

71. Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

Easily the most authentic film in a generation about British gay
life, but also a tender, open-hearted romance about sudden connection
and ideas of belonging. Tom Cullen and Chris New play two young guys
in Nottingham who pick each other up in a bar, and realise there’s
something more between them than the usual substance-fuelled, bleary
attraction. Haigh’s film captures the nervous rhythms of a new mutual
crush beautifully, but also makes their pillow-talk dig bravely down
into the loneliness and frustration of contemporary gay culture.

72. Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)

Jay (Neil Maskell), a soldier-turned-hitman jaded by the unspecified
horrors of a previous assignment, is hired to carry out a string of
executions – a priest, a librarian, and an MP – although his client
seems to have even bigger things for him in mind. Ben Wheatley’s
blood-freezing state-of-the-nation horror film grabs hold of a
familiar British kitchen-sink setting – drab housing estates, fading
business hotels – and wrenches it out of its socket, creating an
atmosphere of hyperreal panic and dread.

73. Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012)

Sound is a sacrament in the Berberian Sound Studio: it enters
innocuously through the ears before transubstantiating into something
more sinister. That might be the most straightforward way of
describing what happens in this thrillingly unstraightforward film
from the English director Peter Strickland about the odd goings-on in
a fusty Italian post-production suite.

74. The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard, 2013)

The Selfish Giant, the second feature by the English filmmaker Clio
Barnard, is a brilliant and soul-scouring fable about scrap men
and scrap children; two outcast generations doomed to forever sift
through life’s rubbish dump. So hauntingly perfect is Barnard’s film,
and so skin-pricklingly alive does it make you feel to watch it, that
at first you can hardly believe the sum of what you have seen: the
astonishingly strong performances from her two young, untutored leads;
Barnard’s layered script; Mike Eley’s snow-crisp cinematography that
makes the streets of Bradford shine.

75. Under the Skin

Nine years in the making and worth every microsecond of its
torturous development, Jonathan Glazer’s science-fiction horror film
shows us Britain from the ultimate outsider’s perspective. Scarlett
Johansson plays a nameless alien creature who’s harvesting men for
their meat, seducing them into her transit van and taking them to be
pulped. The early hunting scenes, shot undercover in Glasgow, have a
skin-tightening coldness to them, but then the alien starts warming to
her prey – a flicker of humanity that alters the course of her
mission. Indelible images, sounds and ideas come in such quick
succession they leave you reeling. Not that you’d ever want to, but
this is not a film that can be shaken off.